Month: September 2017

Despite the aura of calm projected by Golden Knights owner Bill Foley, his nascent desert franchise is already on the clock. The recent announcement that the Oakland Raiders will be moving to Las Vegas in 2019, has already undermined Foley’s plan to be the only show in town. If the Golden Knights don’t win over the Vegas fanbase in relatively short order, it could prove almost impossible for hockey to get ever get a foothold in Sin City.

As a result, the team faced a variety of difficult decisions going into the 2017 expansion draft. On one hand, the team could try to win immediately with aging veterans like Eric Staal, which would allow them to establish a foothold in the market, but also put them at risk of years of mediocrity as older players lose their fights with Father Time. On the other hand, the team could tank in the hopes of finding stars at the top of the draft, but the resulting efforts could further exacerbate the fan bases preference for the incoming NFL juggernaut.

In order to evaluate the quality of the selections of GM George McPhee, I viewed each pick as a “trade” and applied prototype of a “Trade Machine” to look at each selection, given the choices available. For example, Vegas chose Clayton Stoner and Shea Theodore from the Ducks over Sami Vatanen, which means, in essence, the selection was a trade for Theodore and Stoner for Vatenen straight up. After looking at all 31 selections, I compared Vegas’ actual roster to one consisting of an optimal roster calculated using DTMAboutHeart’s GAR statistic. The results are below.

Offside challenges are, to say the least, a controversial topic. While many have advocated for the benefit of getting the call right even at the cost of a delay in the game, it’s almost indisputable that the introduction of the offside challenge has slowed down the flow of the game. Over the past two years, coaches have challenged any play that was remotely close with the hopes of getting lucky on the video review, to the dismay of basically anyone other than replay technicians.

Those spurious challenges are one reason why the NHL modified the rules around coach’s challenges yesterday. Starting next season, instead of a failed challenge simply resulting in the loss of a team’s timeout, clubs will now face a 2 minute penalty for losing an offside challenge. Upon hearing of this change many fans were apoplectic, complaining that this rule change could bury teams who were already reeling from giving up a goal against, and would severely limit the willingness of coaches to challenge even legitimate missed offside calls.

Fan reaction notwithstanding, however, the question coaches should be asking is whether they should be changing their approach in response to the new rules. The threat of killing off a penalty for a failed challenge may seem like a big deal, but it’s important to note that teams only score on roughly 20% of their power play opportunities. Fans will surely remember when a failed challenge leads to a power play goal against, but there will certainly be occasions when the potential gain from overturning your opponent’s goal outweighs the risk.